The Son (2002)

A+
SDG

What is forgiveness? It’s easy to say what it
isn’t — it isn’t overlooking the trespass, or pretending
it didn’t happen; it doesn’t necessarily mean trusting the
trespasser, or excusing him from punishment. But it’s also not
just pious words or fuzzy feelings.

Age Appropriateness

MPAA Rating

Caveat Spectator

Actions, not words or feelings, are at the center of The
Son, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s challenging, nearly
religious parable of humanity, fallenness, and grace. It is
challenging, in part, because the Dardenne brothers aren’t at
pains to explain characters or relationships, establish
motivations, or to set up plot points in the usual fashion.
Events unfold with documentary-like restraint, and the rhythms
are those of ordinary life, full of mundane activity and
repetition. What matters is not how the characters feel, but what
they do.

A tightly wound, middle-aged carpenter named Olivier (Olivier
Gourmet) works with young boys at some sort of center. His inner
life, his motives and emotions, aren’t revealed to us, and he
doesn’t seem preoccupied with them himself. He wears a leather
back brace, and has perhaps been injured at some point; and his
work itself may be a similar sort of prop against some injury of
his past.

Presently a youth arrives at the center whose name is Francis
(Morgan Marinne) and whose presence has a strange effect on
Olivier. At first it seems that nothing may come of it, but
various chance circumstances lead Olivier to take stock of his
life and what he has lost. And he makes a radical choice: He will
teach this boy carpentry.

Why? Why does he do it, and what does it matter? Far too many
reviews of The Son have robbed readers by explaining what
the film invites the viewer to discover. Suffice to say that in
nearly any other film, as critic A. O. Scott shrewdly observes,
the situation between Olivier and Francis would almost inevitably
lead either to vigilante-style vengeance or else overwrought,
touchy-feely navel-gazing. In plotting a third course, The
Son is in virtually uncharted waters. To watch this film is
to breathe fresh air and to see stars in the sky that can never
be seen from the all-too-frequented trade routes followed by
other films.

Along with his back brace, other facts about Olivier are clues
to his character and nature. The precision with which he judges
and estimates measurements and distances is part of the
uncompromising way he looks at the world; at a glance he can
identify Francis’ height to within a fraction — literally taking
the measure of the man — and can also specify the distance
separating them. As a craftsman and teacher he takes a hands-on
approach, working the wood, working with the boys at the center,
insisting that the end result be straight and true.

These aren’t mere metaphorical conceits. The story is too
concrete, too mundane for allegorizing. Olivier’s exactness and
precision as a carpenter isn’t a symbol for an uncompromising
moral outlook; they are rather the same trait, applied in two
different spheres.

In the same way, Olivier’s decision to teach Francis carpentry
is no symbolic gesture, as it might be for another man. In
Citizen Kane, when Kane’s old friend Leland begins a
scathing critical review of Kane’s wife’s inauspicious debut as
an opera singer, Kane fires Leland — but not before finishing
Leland’s review just as Leland might have written it himself. "He
was always trying to prove something," Leland said later. By
teaching Francis carpentry, Olivier isn’t trying to prove
anything. It’s simply the only way this craftsman knows of going
about what needs to be done.

Echoes of the gospel story are unavoidable. Olivier’s trade,
carpentry, recalls the occupation of Jesus and of his foster
father St. Joseph; and from the title The Son we infer the
presence of a father, with possible resonances with St. Joseph,
God the Father, or both.

Eventually it becomes clear that the premise of The Son
shares much in common with certain grimmer parables of Jesus,
parables that involve shocking violence and end with wrath
falling upon the wicked. But the parallels are far from exact,
and there is reason to think that in the end the story may wind
up dimly but distinctly resembling one of the best-loved and most
reassuring of the parables.

But, again, The Son is no allegory. Olivier is first
and foremost a very ordinary and imperfect man in very imperfect
circumstances (he is divorced, his wife with another man).
Gourmet’s performance as Olivier, which took the top prize at
Cannes, is almost definitive in its mundaneness and lack of
actorly affect; he never asks for our sympathy or admiration, and
certainly never invites us to consider Olivier as any sort of
archetype or symbolic figure. He is simply who he is, as plain
and unassuming as wood and sandpaper.

The true challenge posed by the film is not piecing together
the story, nor teasing out its meaning, but embracing its
implications in our own lives. Not that The Son is
didactic or a "message" film — it isn’t — but it is one of the
most profoundly moral and human films I have seen in years.

On first viewing, The Son’s rigorous method makes for
comparatively demanding viewing. The Dardennes aren’t interested
in entertaining the viewer, but in something far more valuable.
The difficulty of the first viewing, though, becomes irrelevant
in light of its rewards, and subsequent viewings only deepen
those rewards.